It’s possible to be too open.
Often when we learn about spirituality, we’re taught to be open, receptive, and empty, and to connect with higher beings and make ourselves available for service. That’s good when you’re used to being very focused on material life, but some people go too far. Something they’ve learnt or their experiences with heightened spiritual states induced by substances such as Ayahuasca, mushrooms, and others, cause them to open themselves completely without understanding the potential risks.
When someone’s teaching you to open to a specific source, whether it’s God, some kind of energy, or a specific higher level being, there’s safety because you know what you’re connecting with. And when you learn how to connect with your higher self, that also safe because it always comes from a place of love and is connected at a divine level.
But I’ve seen some people open themselves as if they’re walking through a marketplace with their pockets stuffed with cash and saying, “Hey, take me. Anybody want to sell me something? Anybody want something from me? Anybody want me to work for them? I don’t care what your conditions are. Just come and get me. I’m totally available.”
I’ve also seen people give themselves in service with all their heart and soul in a very emotional way, making themselves extremely available without much sense of who or what they’re making themselves available to.
In the past, religions tended to control the way we accessed divine sources and support, whether it was through a single god or multiple deities or some other way. Nowadays, we’re becoming more aware that there are many different kinds of beings in the inter-dimensions, and that many people connect with them, regardless of whether they’re religious or not.
You can connect with angels and archangels, ascended masters and guides, different kinds of mentors, your higher self, and any other number of beings. You can also connect with birds, dead grandmothers, trees, and different aspects of nature and people, dead or alive. We’re recognizing so many different ways of connecting now as we wake up and realize the universe is way more alive than we thought it was.
The challenge in making yourself too open and available is that you don’t know what or who you’re connecting with. It’s like a young girl going out into the streets and making herself flagrantly available to any man she meets. Of course we should live in a society where men won’t take advantage of such naivete, but at the moment we don’t. Girls need to learn how to take care of themselves.
The same is true with work. If you say, “I’ll do anything for you for at any price; I don’t care whether you exploit me or not; I don’t care whether you pay me or not; I’ll just do any work you give me,” somebody may take advantage of you and it probably won’t be a happy experience.
It’s similar for us as spiritual human beings. It may not seem right that other energies can use our energy in ways we wouldn’t want them to, but the fact is that they can and they do. And whether that happens primarily depends on you. If you make yourself totally open and available, it’s quite easy for your energy to be used for some purpose that you don’t understand or endorse.
I’ve seen people receive bad advice and think it’s higher guidance simply because they’re tuning into something that doesn’t usually talk and they’re hearing messages. They’re not aware that the source of those messages is very unlikely to offer good advice.
You may be able to connect with nature and receive all kinds of beautiful messages, and it’s possible that some form of higher energy is communicating that way. But you can’t be sure that just because you heard a bird or a flower speak to you, what it said is a holy truth that you must follow.
First of all, you don’t know exactly what the source is. Second, you don’t know how accurate your interpretation is. You can’t be sure that just because you’re receiving messages or guidance from some source, (a) it’s good guidance, (b) it’s guidance that’s specifically relevant to you. and (c) you’re interpreting that guidance accurately and faithfully in a way that’s beneficial for you.
I’m not trying to scare you, but I’m definitely sounding a cautionary note here. Not everything “out there” has your best interests at heart. I’ve seen people who are very spiritually open end up in situations that would have landed them in mental hospitals if they hadn’t had enough money to stay clear of the institutional system.
I highly recommend that you learn to open to higher sources of energy. But to do it wisely, here are three ways to protect yourself. If you don’t know how to do these yet, don’t worry. You can learn.
1. Connect through your higher self
Make a habit of connecting through your higher self. Learn how to communicate with and gain the conscious support of your higher self. Then you can ask your higher self to connect you with other sources that are benign and supportive for you. Your higher self is like your director of operations and can connect with all the different sources for you from a position that’s deeply loving and protective of your best interests.
2. Connect with a powerful, benign source
Connect with God, Source the Creator, All That Is—the most powerful, profound source of all that you can conceive of. There’s just one thing to watch out for here. Make sure that the god you’re connecting with is not an angry, punishing, or justice-delivering God because that kind of god is not coming from unconditional love. When you connect with that conception of God, you’re connecting with something that can produce scary consequences for you.
3. Connect with love or the Light first
Make sure that you connect first with unconditional love or the Light (with a capital L) and that whatever sources you connect with are part of unconditional love, the Light, or are connected with either or both of those. This gives you protection and security and ensures you’re communicating with a genuinely divine source.
How do you know if you’re too open?
- You sense you’re being used by some energy which doesn’t feel good to you.
- You feel you have no control over the guidance you receive. Sometimes it’s positive and uplifting, maybe amazingly so, and sometimes it seems to be dark, frightening, or highly undesirable.
- You find that however much you connect, you’re always getting into a very reactive state.
- You feel controlled, used, or manipulated (not by human beings).
- You’re constantly trying to clear yourself of negativity, get rid of your ego, or eliminate the negative sides of yourself.
These are all signs that whatever you’re connected with isn’t coming from a very true source.
What can you do if this sounds like you?
Building a new, more supportive connection can be quite a journey, especially if you’ve used plant medicine practices to open radically and very quickly, without necessarily knowing what you were opening to.
The first key is learning how to connect with a truly divine source that’s coming from unconditional love or the Light. The Light is in everything. It’s in the darkness as well as in the light. It’s in the negativity as well as the positivity. When you connect with the Light or unconditional love, you have no desire to get rid of any part of yourself, even what you perceive as negative. You accept it. You may transmute it or transform it, but you do so in love and light, not out of a need to reject it.
The second key is to learn how to connect with what you’re creating in life, not what you’re reacting to. When you’re creative, you have a vision. You’re sharing something with the world which has a focus and direction to it. You’re not constantly chasing bright shiny objects, one idea today, another idea tomorrow. It’s a clear, committed, deep decision that leads to powerful and profound contribution.
The more your energy is occupied in shaping, forming, and creating your contribution, the less you leave available to any passing energy that wants to pop some message into you because either it or you have nothing better to do. It becomes less exciting to receive guidance that distracts you and more interesting to get guidance that’s deeply aligned with your purpose and direction and supports you in making wise decisions that create beautiful outcomes.
Shifting your connection
If you’ve become very open and vulnerable to passing or random energies that pick you up and use your energy or give you advice that doesn’t work out really well, give yourself time to learn how to connect differently. You might get the point very quickly and be able to shift direction right away, but in extreme cases it may take you some months or even years to completely upgrade your spiritual connection. Don’t lose heart. However long it takes, the process is worthwhile.
Usually if you have a very open connection, you’ve had some amazing experiences, so there’s good mixed in with the bad. When you’re very attached to the good, you don’t want to let go of it. It becomes part of your identity. You tend to value your ability to connect with what you perceive as a very high or very pure source, regardless of the negative experiences you’ve been having at the same time.
It often takes time to let go of that old connection and open to a new, more stable, safe, or protective source. What I’ve found is that you need to connect with a higher, more inclusive source of goodness, which is a more powerful connection for you. If you want to let go of the negative energies that are using you and find stability in your life, you replace the old attachment by growing your goal, direction, or vision, and creating your contribution.
It’s hard to do this on your own because you’ll tend to go back to the best of what you’ve known before whenever you’re not feeling confident. You’re learning to bring in a new connection that you’re unfamiliar with. It takes courage to make this decision and a lot of trust to know that it’s going to work. But if you make the wise decision to connect with a source that is coming from unconditional love or the Light, you’ll never regret it.
It’s a very big shift. It’s powerful. It can be challenging because you’re letting go of something that’s been the best you’ve experienced so far, and you don’t know yet that you can connect with something even better. It’s only when the new connection is established and working powerfully that you’ll feel deeply appreciative of the shift you’ve made and grateful for this new energy that’s so much better than the old one.
Remember
Unconditional love or light means that nothing is rejected. The Light is as strong in the darkest parts of your life as in the lightest. Love includes everything.
If you want to learn how to communicate with your Higher Self, here’s a simple online course that teaches you how to do it: https://courses.sarahmccrum.com/bundles/connect-with-your-higher-self
